Chapter 350: Skull Well

At the evening briefing, the other two groups each reported an anomalous discovery.

Viewed in isolation, neither report amounted to much.

But when Inspector Harding spread the two sheets of paper side by side on the table, his gaze tracked back and forth across the map twice.

"The line connecting these two points passes through the Row B tent area."

"Pratt, take your people and walk this line. Start from the water source terminal."

Early the next morning, Pratt led Richard's group to the end of the camp's water supply line.

Squatting at the pipe joint, he pulled a glass bottle from his pocket.

He twisted open the valve, and the pipe coughed out a burst of bubbles mixed with brown, rusty sludge before proper tap water finally began to flow.

He filled the bottle about two fingers deep and held it up to his eyes.

The water was clear. An ordinary person wouldn't have spotted a single flaw.

Pratt studied it for a moment.

"Your turn."

He handed the bottle to Richard.

Richard spread out his Silent Observation, and the Still Water of his Inspiration pressed against the side of the glass.

The water was clean, no different from what flowed out of the faucets in the Imperial Capital University dormitories.

But about three or four millimeters below the surface, a layer of something clung to the inner wall of the bottle.

It hung there in suspension, neither rising nor sinking.

"There's something in the water," Richard said, handing the bottle back to Pratt. "It isn't an issue with the pipe itself."

"Can you read where it came from?"

"I can't read its origin." Richard shook his head.

"I can only confirm that it doesn't belong to the water itself. It seeped in from the outside."

Pratt said nothing. He set the bottle down on the stone pier next to the pipe.

"Keep moving downstream. Take a sample every twenty yards."

He divided the tasks among the rest of the group.

Edmund and Maggie would inspect along the right side of the pipe, Catherine would log the samples, and Richard would walk the left side with Pratt.

This task took up the better part of the morning.

"There's a problem with the foundation in this area where the pipe passes through."

Pratt squatted down and scraped his fingernail along the outer wall of the pipe.

He glanced at the muddy ground beneath his feet.

"Before the 1870s, the warehouse district was a fishing port and pier. There's an old stone foundation beneath the pier, and beneath that are the ruins of a medieval breakwater.

The Port Authority archives don't state what was mixed into the breakwater's building materials."

At the briefing that afternoon, Harding, accompanied by the Port Authority, applied for a limited excavation.

An engineering company sent a team over the following afternoon.

Six soldiers shouldering shovels and pickaxes began to dig along the edge of the Row B tent area.

When they reached a depth of two feet, a shovel struck something, producing a distinctly different sound.

The engineers swapped their shovels for small pickaxes, carefully scraping the dirt away bit by bit.

After they chipped away the lime mortar, a stone surface was revealed underneath.

Richard squatted at the edge of the pit and peered down.

In his mind, Erudition pulled up all the relevant image comparisons.

"Ancient Gaulish Inscriptions," Richard reported his judgment.

Maggie squeezed her way to the front of the crowd and sat cross-legged by the edge of the pit, looking down.

"I've seen the way these curves run back at home."

"They aren't exactly the same, but they're similar."

She pointed to a cluster of symbols in the lower left corner of the stone that were mostly obscured by mud.

"Look here. A downward-facing opening on a circle has only one meaning in Ancient Celtic Inscriptions."

"What does it mean?" Edmund asked beside her.

"Leading deep underground."

Maggie pulled her hand back from the edge of the stone.

"This set of inscriptions is pointing the way."

"Pointing where?"

"Pointing to something even deeper beneath this stone surface."

But based solely on a single stone surface exposed in a test pit, the information they could glean was extremely limited.

Over the next few days, the joint investigation team split up to advance along several tracks simultaneously.

Montagu and Fischer were seconded to assist with numbering the pipeline samples and organizing the data, while Edith proved to be a massive help in classifying and identifying the bone fragments found by the pit.

Edmund scoured the Port Authority's box of moldy old archives.

Every generation knew there was something underneath, and every generation chose to put a lid on it and ignore it.

Richard and Catherine were tasked with transcribing and cross-referencing the unearthed inscriptions.

When the engineers reached a depth of four feet, their shovels struck stone once again.

But this time, it was the rim of a well.

The opening faced upward, measuring about two and a half feet in diameter.

"Stop!" Pratt shouted, halting an engineer who was about to keep digging.

He leaned over the edge of the pit and peered into the well, his face completely expressionless.

The core function of the hidden trench beneath the inscribed stone was a kind of "triple reception."

The triple aspect corresponded to the cruelest sacrificial tradition of the ancient Gauls.

The chosen tribute had to endure three methods of death.

First, they were strangled with a rope as an offering to the tree god Esus.

Next, their throat was slit to bleed them out as an offering to the tribal god Toutatis.

Finally, they were held underwater and drowned as an offering to the thunder god Taranis.

Three methods of death layered upon a single person, allowing the three gods to each take what they required.

When archaeologists pulled the Lindow Man bog body from the marsh, there were ligature marks on his neck, a slit across his throat, and his lungs were packed full of sludge.

The inscriptions on the stone surface recorded the receiving end of this very ritual.

After the ritual was performed across the strait and the tribute pushed into the water, an ether signal would travel along the path at the bottom of the strait to this end.

The receiving-end inscriptions would confirm: the tribute had arrived, and the ritual was complete.

The receiving end would then transmit a "receipt acknowledged" signal back.

Once the acknowledgment signal reached the sending end, the water's surface there would briefly grow calm.

The priests called this brief stillness on the water "the god's hushing."

It meant the god was satisfied and had quieted down.

But now, on the continent, the ritual was being carried out by machine guns and shrapnel.

They did it ten thousand times faster than the priests, with ten thousand times the efficiency.

Richard leaned over the pit, bringing his face close to the lowest layer of the stone.

At the very bottom of the inscriptions, wedged in a crevice buried by thousands of years of lime mortar and mud, a small artifact was embedded.

He used his fingertip to gently push aside a little of the mud around the edge of the crevice.

What emerged was a fish-shaped pendant.

The fish's design was incredibly primitive. Just a few curves sketched out its outline, ending in a forked tail fin and a slightly open mouth.

Richard pressed his Silent Observation against it.

The fish pendant felt warm.

In Gaulish culture, this fish symbolized "the guide who travels freely through the water."

Richard had no authority to move the pendant; it was part of the seal system.

But in the dozen or so seconds his Inspiration lingered against it, the Available Points on his panel ticked upward by about 0.2.

Harding summoned everyone together.

"Let's compile what each of you has read. You guys go first."

Pratt spoke up first.

"The stone of the well walls and the hidden trench are from the same batch, and the composition of the black mortar is identical. It's a complete system built in the same period by the same group of people."

Catherine flipped open her notebook.

"The load-bearing weight on the east side of the inscriptions is greater than on the west side, and the distribution of bone fragments around the pit is also denser in the east and sparser in the west."

She turned another page.

"The bone fragments are extremely small; it's impossible to tell whether they are human or animal.

But they're distributed in a radial pattern, with the center pointing directly toward the mouth of the well."

Maggie took over the conversation.

"Those half-closed circles on the stone surface pointing into the ground—in ancient Gaulish sacrificial ruins, they only appear next to one kind of structure."

She paused.

"A well. A well used for sacrifices."

"The Gauls called it a 'Skull Well'."

The moment those words were spoken, the expressions of everyone present changed.

Edmund tightened his grip on the Silver Crucifix at his chest, his lips moving rapidly for a brief second.

Richard nodded and provided a more detailed supplement.

"The ancient Gauls were a notorious headhunting people. Even the Romans were horrified by them during their conquest of Gaul.

Gaulish warriors would sever their enemies' heads, string them around their horses' necks, and bring them back to their villages to nail above their doorways."

"The heads weren't merely for decoration. On a sacrificial level, a severed head was believed to be the residence of the soul.

Severing an enemy's head was tantamount to severing his soul. By soaking the soul in water, the soul would be locked away by the water."

"The locked soul became an anchor for suppression."

He looked at Harding, the man in charge.

"The ancient Gauls dug these wells on the shores of both sides of the strait. Their purpose must have been to soak their hunted heads in them to suppress whatever restless things lay at the bottom of the strait."

Harding listened to everyone's reports and nodded.

"I also found some information regarding this Skull Well tradition in the Port Authority's files."

"When the Romans arrived, they considered it barbaric and filled the wells, building breakwaters over the top of them.

They never removed the heads from the bottom of the wells. The people in the Middle Ages built a pier on the breakwater, and the people in the 1870s built warehouses on the pier."

He cast a glance at the ground beneath his feet.

"Every generation builds new things on the ruins of the previous generation. No one knows what is buried at the very bottom."

He looked toward Pratt.

"The higher-ups need a complete assessment report."

"Also, a plan to reroute the pipeline needs to be drafted alongside it."

The immediate problem was that the sea gates had been opened.

Those "old tributes" that had lain sunken at the bottom of the water in the Flanders Lowlands for thousands of years had been stirred awake by the saltwater.

At the same time, hundreds, even thousands, of men were dying every day on that seawater-soaked plain on the Flanders Frontline.

Artillery shells, machine guns, bayonets... On the other side of the veil, the ritual only recognized one absolute condition: "the dead must die in the water."

The remains of the soldiers soaking in the seawater within the Flanders Flooded Zone...

Whether they had been blown to pieces or drowned, the ritual system's judgment deemed every single one of them as new tributes.

The entire Flanders Flooded Zone had transformed into a continuously functioning, automatically harvesting sacrificial ground.

The signals hitting the receiving end on this side of the strait were growing denser and stronger.

The Skull Well and the inscribed stone surface were already on the verge of overloading. The "dampness" lingering in the camp was simply the overflow.

Following this discovery, the various groups were assigned extra night patrol shifts.

The shift ran from 1:00 AM to 5:00 AM.

The anomaly mentioned in the briefing—the pipeline automatically spewing saltwater—occurred precisely within this time frame.

Nothing happened during the night shifts of the first two days.

Tent canvas snapped wildly in the wind, and occasionally the wail of a baby drifted from deep within one of the tents, abruptly cutting off midway.

Richard lay on an old wooden crate, bundled up in his coat, with a clean glass testing bottle sitting in front of him.

Wild Sleep allowed him to maintain awareness of his surroundings even while in a light slumber.

His consciousness floated on the surface between sleep and wakefulness; the slightest disturbance would instantly yank it up.

At 2:43 AM.

Richard opened his eyes.

The sound of the water inside the pipe had changed.

"Gurgle."

Richard twisted open the testing valve.

He filled the bottle halfway and brought it right under his nose.

A foul, fishy stench choked him, sending him into a coughing fit.

Saline-alkali mud from the bottom of a marsh, dregs that had sat rotting for thousands of years... all mixed together into a foul, rank, and aggressively salty stench.

This smell lasted for less than half a minute before the regular tap water returned.

Richard sealed the half-bottle of water and used incredibly small handwriting on the label to record the time and describe the phenomenon.

During the shift change near dawn, the four of them met up.

Maggie was the first to speak.

"Water droplets condensed on the wall of my section of the pipe."

"When?" Richard asked.

"Less than a minute past 2:43."

She shoved both hands deep into her coat pockets and tucked her chin into her scarf.

"The water droplets were crawling along the pipe wall in the same direction."

"Which direction?"

"Toward the water source."

The water droplets were crawling back the way they came.

Richard matched this piece of information with the timing of his half-bottle of water; it aligned perfectly.

Catherine pulled her small notebook from her coat pocket.

"The synchronized breathing appeared again. The timing perfectly matched the anomaly in the pipeline."

Edmund stood on the outermost edge of the four.

"A few of the children on the east side of the tent area in my section."

"They were asleep, but their lips were moving. I leaned in to listen."

"Every single child was repeating the exact same phrase."

"What phrase?"

"L'eau monte—the water is rising."

The gaslight flickered in the wind, its orange glow swaying back and forth.